What Does The Love Witch Ending Mean For Its Characters?

Looking at ‘The Love Witch’ in a more subdued light, I see the ending of the film mostly symbolizing things. Elaine’s death and the final shots of her corpse act as a symbol for her status as a vessel for all of the opposing desires that the film has been detailing throughout. She’s a symbol for the conflicting needs that societies put on women: for men to desire them, for women to be independent and to be complete in themselves.

The rest of the characters function as moral compasses throughout the film and in this final scene in particular. The men harmed by Elaine reveal the fragility of the male ego when confronted by a woman who refuses to play by the rules and perform in the way that is expected of her. The women in Elaine’s life, in particular, function to highlight the narrow roles available to females in film, and how she rebels against these expectations in a number of key scenes. The way in which punishment and myth-making can often supplant true accountability in a story is one that The Love Witch explores, and it is an idea that lingers long after the film’s beautiful images have faded from the mind.

This last scene was all a bit of a nightmare, to be honest. I watched The Love Witch last night and the end of the film was really sweet but twisted in a very bad way. It made for quite an uncomfortable watch. I had brought a cup of tea and my notebook in order to write down colors and details of costumes but in the end it was the way the characters were treated in the film which had stayed with me the most. As for the main character Elaine, I thought that her fate was a very sad one. At the end of the day she had been condemned by society for not behaving in the way that they expected women to behave and then she had been killed by that very same society for using magic in order to get her way. However, she hadn’t used her magic for evil purposes. She had simply been unable to live in a world which is so keen on perpetuating romantic fantasy while at the same time loathing the women who bring about that fantasy.

We only see the men fall for Elaine towards the end, and mostly they don’t learn anything from their experiences. What we see is their fragility, their ego, their entitlement, and how they mistake control for love. The women in the film are mostly stuck in a script too, sometimes complicit in Elaine’s woes and sometimes trying to rescue her from herself. The ending of the film is more echo than closure. It is a vicious cycle of fantasy and control and blame. I loved so many aspects of this film, and yet it was also very frustrating to see this same world portrayed again. I would like to rewatch this film with someone to argue over the best costume moment and then to specify which moment was the turning point for that character.

I felt jolted after the credits rolled on ‘The Love Witch’. The end was left very untidy. From my perspective, the main character Elaine’s story mirrors that of the rest of the characters, i.e. she is punished in a way that seems to be morally just but is in reality a result of a society that is afraid of women who are different from other women. So she gets killed or defeated by the expectations of gender that she refused to conform to. Does she deserve to die? That is not the point. Her death/defeat shows how these expectations casually ruin the lives of women who are different.

Supporting characters in The Love Witch are one-dimensional in their fixation and in the way of the gossip that women engage in. All of this is exposed as cultural habits of men and women and their way of looking at romance and of longing. It is a film about costumes, yes, but also about how we tell stories of longing and control and dress them up as romance. It makes you aware of the tiny power moves in everyday life, and makes you wonder if we’re just replaying the same scenes over and over again.